The increasing availability of reasonably priced satellite communication services, and a variety of narrow bandwidth (voice/data) and wide bandwidth (video) devices to meet the needs of a broad spectrum of communication system users, has led to communication system architectures that can be tailored in terms of connectivity structure and customer utilization. This diversity of equipment types and signal processing capability has led to the desire to have `local` area networks (LANs), customarily limited to a terrestrial-based systems, typically limited to geographical area, be expanded to encompass a much larger scale of communication services, preferably those employing satellite link transmission equipment to connect terminal devices among well dispersed office sites.
To facilitate inter-office communications, it is preferred to have such satellite-based systems configured as full mesh networks, diagrammatically illustrated in FIG. 1, where any terminal device 10 in the network (comprised of a non-limitative example of four earth stations 11, 12, 13, 14 in the illustrated example) has a direct satellite link 20 (via one hop through a relay satellite 30) to any other terminal device 10 in the network. Connectivity between a respective terminal device 10 that is ported to an associated station interface and a respective terminal device ported to another station interface may be effected by providing each earth station with a multiplexing, demultiplexing subsystem, that is operative to controllably uplink messages from any terminal device (e.g. audio (voice), data, video equipment) over an outbound link and to distribute downlink messages to their intended destination terminal devices.
One type of multiplexing scheme that might be used could involve a time division multiplexing (TDM) and demultiplexing arrangement through which a fixed number of bytes for each user port would be allocated within a fixed information frame. The frame size (total number of bytes) may be determined by the number of ports and their data rates, and the number of frames transmitted per second. The number of TDM frames per second determines the aggregate data rate. The aggregate data rate includes the total user port data rate plus framing overhead.
Interfacing respective terminal devices with the TDM subsystem may be effected by means of a dedicated multiport switch associated with the respective multiplexer and demultiplexer units of the earth station, with each multiport switch being configured for an equal number of data communications equipment (DCE) and data terminal equipment (DTE) ports, so as to provide full matrix capability between DCE and DTE ports. The port speed and format (DCE to DTE) must match; however, matrix switches can usually translate between different physical and electrical characteristics.
A problem associated with such a TDM-matrix switch earth station architecture proposal is the fact that its terminal-to-terminal connectivity involves dedicated port connections, which remain fixed unless the system is physically reconfigured. As a result, in such a system, only a very limited selectivity for voice calls is afforded, since only point-to-point connections can be effected between voice multiplexers and not among the voice circuits themselves that connect to the voice multiplexers. In addition, TDM schemes are very sensitive to timing and network synchronization, since no queuing is performed. A master network timing source is required for all network subsystems. Also, because suppliers of multiplexer and matrix switch components are not the same, different monitor and control mechanisms are required for each respective piece of equipment. This requirement is further burdened by the fact that, due to the unique character of a simplex data stream, the required multiplexer/demultiplexer is not an off-the-shelf product. Finally, the cost of such a system is not insubstantial, since each of the multiport switch and the multiplexer and demultiplexer components must be purchased separately.